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Archive for June, 2009

Quick Thoughts on Working from Home

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

It has been almost a week now since I moved my office home and I’ve been slammed with work so I thought it might be good to write a few things that I’ve noticed this far.

I work just as efficiently in my home office as I did in my old office. I was discussing this with my wife and I think this is partially because I worked so independently while I was in the shared office, and partly because she is home about to give birth in a few weeks — I’m motivated to keep working and bringing in a decent income when she is around.
I work non-standard hours. I used to work from 8-5 at the office, but at home I get up and start working at 6am, work until 8:30, have breakfast and a shower, work until lunch, take a break for an hour, work until 4pm. Its a bit more of a split up day, but I like the flexibility. I’ve also been putting in time in the evenings, but only because I have a big deadline this week.
I eat better. My office was in a location that had a lot of options for lunch. When I’m working from home I can spend a bit of extra time to make a healthy meal instead of eating out or eating a bag lunch. Even though I used to bring my lunch 3 out of 5 days a week, the lunches I make at home are still better and fresher.

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Moving to a Home Office

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Next Wednesday, my long time business partner, Wes Straub, and I are moving out of the office we have had on 17th Ave in Calgary, AB. We’ve been at that location for almost four years and during that time we’ve done some great work but have also made some business mistakes. We’ve tried going beyond our usual service offerings to try and start web hosting, we had a partnership that didn’t work out, and built relationships with people that were frustrating in the end. We didn’t go into business because it was easy, but because we like the challenge. After four years of having an office we’ve realized: we don’t need an office.

Here’s what it comes down to: we pay $2500 or so a month for a space to work. We meet with clients at the coffee shop or at their offices. We aren’t going to hire anybody else — we’ve found its much better to work with people on a contract basis. So… $2500 a month for a space to sit down in front of a computer and work. I can do that at home for no money. So next Wednesday we move out of the office and move into our home offices. We’ve made an arrangement with a company that provides virtual office services – phone answering, mail and fax services, and has a boardroom we can use when we need it. We didn’t even have those services at our one room office on 17th ave.

I’m going to write a few more posts about how I’m surviving working in my home office, and how it works with a newborn, if all goes well in a month or so. Good bye, office!

Good bye, office!

Tags: home office
Posted in Business | 2 Comments »

WordPress Thoughts

Friday, June 12th, 2009

This site is now running WordPress, pretty much the best blogging software out there, and so I thought it might be good to quickly write about the process and why I love working with it.

Installation

WordPress is fairly straight forward to install, provided you know how to create a database and change some permissions on your webserver. A typical install for me goes like this:

Create a Database and User – Login to MySQL and add a new db, and create a user that has access only to this table. This is important because I do have some other sites running on my server. Although you could do this from the command line, I often find it faster to just load up Navicat for MySQL.
Download the wordpress archive. You can download this from your browser or ssh in to your server and type:
- wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
- tar -zxvf latest.tar.gz, and move the files to the right place.
Load up the site in my browser and fill in the details. I also always change the password that is assigned to you. I have no idea why it assigns you one instead of asking for an admin password.

Theming

Theming WP is really easy. I take the design, usually a PSD, slice it up and write HTML as if I was doing a static page. Next I duplicate the default theme and rename the folder. I drop in my CSS and my images, and edit the header and footer files. That’s pretty much it. You can write the HTML how you want, but I find it easiest to stick to the default theme’s structure: #header, #footer, #sidebar, and #content divs.

Using WP

WP’s admin makes extensive use of AJAX which makes the interface snappy. They’ve really done great job working on the layout and design of the admin. It’s really simple to start using and very powerful once you get into the more advanced details.

Tags: Web Development, wordpress
Posted in Web Development | 1 Comment »

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